The Knp University site has a posted an article where they've shared their favorite PHPStorm Live templates, a set of handy shortcuts that can make for less typing on your part and, as a result, less development time spent on common keystrokes.

Most editors have a feature like this, and if you’re not leveraging them, you’re slowing yourself down. Seriously: taking a few minutes to get into these now could add up to a lot of hours saved in the future. The vim users at KnpLabs love this kind of stuff, and have published their own snippets (docteurklein, PedroTroller, Einenlum).

In our tutorial about live templates, we turn formhandle into a snippet that types about 10 lines of form-handling boilerplate code from 10 characters of text. So I started wondering: what are some other awesome live templates we should all be using?

To this end, they've created a repository to store some of these helpful shortcuts. Their list so far includes shortcuts for a 404 if statement, several Twig tags, several for use in a controller context and YAML formatting. The repository includes instructions on how to install the shortcuts and how to include only the ones you want.

We all have our favorite IDEs/editors when coding. Mine is PhpStorm, and it took a while to master all its shortcuts and establish a rapid workflow. In this article, I’ll share some keyboard shortcuts and tips with you which you should make part of your regular routine if you, too, do your work in this IDE. This article was partially inspired by this Reddit thread, and will be mentioning and demonstrating some of the shortcuts found there as well.

He breaks it up into three main categories with several points each, some with (animated) screenshots:

Thomas Weinert has posted a helpful hint for those developing their PHP applications in a Windows environment - how you can use the PHP 5.4 built-in webserver to test your applications.

PHP 5.4 has an built-in webserver. For local development it is not necessary to install Apache Httpd or another webserver anymore. You can just start an server from the command line. [...] To make things a little easier you can create a windows shortcut.

He shows what it looks like running in a console and steps you through the process of setting up the shortcut, giving you the flexibility to contril things like window size and buffer size.

It's time to bring the keyboard back! When we first started doing things on the web, there wasn't much to do. There were documents with hyperlinks that we can click on but that's about it; that was 15 years ago. Thanks to the growth of sophisticated server-side tools such as PHP and client-side tools such as jQuery, we are now able to do so much more.

The tutorial gives you an example of setting up the key bindings, adding in the listener and pulling them together with some jQuery magic. The PHP comes in to defined the initial key mappings for the menu automatically.

New on the DotVoid blog Danne Lundqvist has posted about the experience of two weeks with the Zend Studio for Eclipse software as a primary editor.

After more than ten years with Emacs and terminal flipping as my primary development environment, whether for C, PHP, WSDL, HTML/CSS or javascript, I decided to try (I mean really really try) an IDE for a while. As PHP is my main focus these days I have been looking towards Zend Studio for Eclipse. I figured Eclipse with it's maturity must work well enough on linux.

Danne talks about the transition from editor to IDE (shortcuts? features? where is everything?) including importing a project in from a subversion repository. He had a few issues as he started out - technical glitches, problems with subversion integration and encoding support - but lots of other good things too (phpDocumentor support, code folding, inline errors/warnings).

Joshua Eichornmentions today about the "digital shortcut" created for his upcoming book "Understanding Ajax" from Prentice Hall.

A chapter from my book, Understanding AJAX has been made available as a digital shortcut. This chapter covers the different ways you can use the data you transfer using XMLHttpRequest.

Document centric approaches based on HTML and XML are described as well as various RPC approaches are shown.

The shortcut focuses on consuming data sent back in an XML or JSON format (and costs $9.99 USD). Joshua notes that he, personally, tends more towards "JSON based RPC approaches or HTML document based approaches" for his communication method. He also mentions client-side XSLT as an alternative to having to parse through and style the large amounts of data returned.

Joshua Eichornmentions today about the "digital shortcut" created for his upcoming book "Understanding Ajax" from Prentice Hall.

A chapter from my book, Understanding AJAX has been made available as a digital shortcut. This chapter covers the different ways you can use the data you transfer using XMLHttpRequest.

Document centric approaches based on HTML and XML are described as well as various RPC approaches are shown.

The shortcut focuses on consuming data sent back in an XML or JSON format (and costs $9.99 USD). Joshua notes that he, personally, tends more towards "JSON based RPC approaches or HTML document based approaches" for his communication method. He also mentions client-side XSLT as an alternative to having to parse through and style the large amounts of data returned.

On the KillerSoft blog today, there's a few comments from Clay Loveless about his trial of Textmate, specifically when dealing with phpDocumentor comment blocks.

I've been a BBEdit user for a decade, and despite my switch to Zend Studio last fall for the bulk of my PHP development, I still find myself going to plain text editors for little tweaks, or less formal "hack it out" efforts.

There are a few things that I've grown very accustomed to as a Zend Studio user over the past several months. One of those is typing "/**" in a PHP document and having a full phpDocumentor docblock appear magically, with the cursor insertion point set on the first line of the comment area.

Unfortunately, TextMate doesn't handle it quite that way, but he's found a similar way to accomplish it - using "doc_cp" followed by a TAB. It doesn't quite handle the preformatted blocks as well as Zend's software does, but that's nothing the scripting features of TextMate can't take care of - he shows you how.